A $16000 computer so cool you’ll drool over desktops again

As laptops have gotten faster, desktops have taken a back seat in the gadget lust sweepstakes. But for performance per dollar, there’s still nothing better than an old-fashioned desktop tower. But how powerful a computer can you build if you’re not optimizing for price? The tweakers over at MaximumPC recently built a dream desktop, sparing no costs, and created a $16000 machine that’s definitely something worth drooling over.

The dream desktop starts with a 3.1Ghz Intel Xeon server processor that costs about $2000 retail, adds 64GB of DDR3 memory, and tops it off with the fastest graphics card NVidia makes–two of them, actually. The excesses don’t stop there–the mad geniuses put six separate hard drives in the case, two 512GB SSDs and four old fashioned spinning disks in a RAID array. After fitting all these components and some liquid cooling into a Silverstone TJ11, they topped off the rig with two Dell IPS panels running at 2560×1600 resolution each.

Sure, it may be a bit of overkill. For instance, the Xeon processor is optimized for server loads, and most home PC builders would be better off going with one of the six-core Core i7s, but there’s certainly something to be said about excess for excess’ sake. And yes, the computer is fast: benchmarks show that the computer notches a 176% faster 3DMark 11 score than a stock Ivy Bridge computer with a GeForce GTX 68.